[DCRM-L] RDA-acceptable: Indicating misprints

[William Hale]

I quite agree with all these points. I
view RDA treatment of misprints with a great deal of concern for all
these reasons, and think we are risking putting librarianly theory over
practicality both for us and our users. I personally have no
problem with [sic] or [i.e.] as they remain standard scholarly practice
outside the library bubble (in England at any rate), but I'm sure we could live with
[thus] and [that is] if we had to.

William Hale.

Rare Books Department,
Cambridge University Library,
West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DR.

Telephone: (+44) (0)1223 333122
Email: William.Hale at lib.cam.ac.uk

On 07/08/2012 21:17, Deborah J. Leslie wrote:
> Very quickly, I'll try to give the basic reasons. I think there are summaries elsewhere, but I can't lay my hand on them just now.
>
>
> 1.       Misprints happen a great deal more frequently in early printed materials than in later ones. Their greater frequency is enough to make this a rare materials issue.
>
> 2.      Although corrections may be put into notes, default displays in many libraries' opacs are not geared toward the users of rare materials; such notes may not even appear on the same screen as the misprint. It is important for users of rare materials to easily identify whether a typo was present on the resource or introduced by the cataloger.
>
> 3.      Although added title access can be made for misprints in the title proper, that doesn't apply to misprints in the imprint.
>
> 4.      Misprints in imprints are particularly pernicious, because place and date of publication are frequently used for identification.
>
> 5.      Separating corrections from the errors is okay if your context is a bibliographic record tied together in its MARC format, more or less. But elements from our bib records are even now being harvested and used in other contexts, such as to name a print in an image database. A whole page of notes isn't going to help the users of that database.
>
> 6.      Finally, given the early and ongoing emphasis about RDA being appropriate for all sorts of constituencies, not just for library bibliographic records, and about the re-use and re-purposing of data, and of the conceptual structure of breaking down things into their elements, I think the JSC made a grave philosophical error to not allow correction of misprints to appear in the element in which the misprint occurs. I hope they reconsider, to at least make it an option. But in the meantime, the users of our catalogs are poorly served by this disconnection.
>
>
> Deborah J. Leslie, M.A., M.L.S. | Head of Cataloging, Folger Shakespeare Library | 201 East Capitol St., S.E. | Washington, D.C. 20003
> djleslie at folger.edu<mailto:djleslie at folger.edu> | 202.675-0369 | http://www.folger.edu<http://www.folger.edu/>
>